Catalyst S+F: We Did This to Ourselves - Chris Arens - MediaBizBloggers

quotWe screwed upquot said Jeff an industry vet quotWe royally screwed up I mean it wasn39t but 15 years agoquot he continued quotthat agencies were sitting on easy street They were taking fees and recognizing commission on large ad budgetsquot While 15 years only slightly predates me I still remember the outward expression of all that money at my first agency gig the President of our local office would show up every so often in his racecarred Ferrari convertible Nowadays your lucky if the local agency lead has enough cash to buy one Mercedes let alone a Ferrari as a second carSo why how did we get into this mess what was the 39royal39 mistake Is it true that the Internet has broken our business model like it has many others to the degree to which we won39t be able to resurrect Or did we make such poor compromises that we have done our own disservice Have we focused so intently on a shinning star that we lost our wayWe have helped businesses resurrect themselves time after time we have helped steer wandering ships We have helped clients focus on the one thing that matters The Audience But quotwe failed miserably in one very critical way quot Jeff would explain quotand I39ll bet we have all given this advice onehundred times over WE DIDN39T PRACTICE WHAT WE PREACHEDquotJeff put it very succinctly quotWe forgot to listen to our clients and find the insight that would drive our own businessquot Excuse me How could an industry so focused on how people think act and what motivates them not listen to their clients it39s the one thing we sermonize Jeff went on quotInstead we focused on awards recognition and entertainmentquotThese are ads people it isn39t HollywoodquotWhat clients needed wanted and coveted was better understanding of their audiences better understanding of their use of technology and how that impacted their brands association and affiliation Instead we focused on the 30 ad fighting for every creative budget we could and offering the Media team a cool 15 minutes to present their plan A plan steeped in thought analysis and insight that you could see the months of blood sweat and tears oozing from the presentationquot Jeff then threw in the humdinger quotand we priced it all in a way that expressed how unimportant media was in our eyes we all but gave it awayquotWhy not right media is so unsexy how could an agency truly stand apart by focusing on the expertise of media That value is abstract but a real funny 30 ad wins the account everyday Jeff39s rebuttal quotNo doubt that39s correct but we failed not in how we win business but in how we staffed and charged for services We got caught up in our own hoopla deciding that creative services were the future and that media would be commoditized by technologyquot Now some 15 years later we find that Media is increasingly more important and that creative services are largely being commoditized see XLNT Ads and any publisher with a large enough media budget behind youI had to think about this concept a bit as I know it to be true I never took that approach to thinking about our issues And certainly when you think about the time effort and training that goes into a media planner being an expert in his craft it does make sense Not to sound callous and over simplify but what the Internet has done has shown that people with a video camera and some basic technical knowhow can be funny entertaining and clever without any formal training But I challenge those same people to identify their target audience and market to them in an efficient manner I am not understating the value of good content but when 80 made up number based solely on perception of the ads today do not pass the consumer snifftest for entertaining it is hard to argue that the real value actually comes from a group of experts guiding that content to the right sets of peopleAs media continues to fragment and audiences continue to jump between vehicles the planner is becoming increasingly more important in helping navigate the media waters to find the hypersegments that the brands so covet However we cannot continue to price these engagements to win the account we need to price these engagements to sustain ourselves and create a business Leveraging insights from a vast amount of data is becoming increasingly important this is a valuable service not a commoditized one now charge for itChris Arens is a Partner and Head of Client Services at Catalyst SF He can be reached at chriscatalystsfcomRead all Chris39 MediaBizBloggers commentaries at The Marketing Capital Report MediaBizBloggersCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBlogger

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Catalyst S+F: We Did This to Ourselves - Chris Arens - MediaBizBloggers

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